E10 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022Book WorldBY MEREDITH MARANO
n our 10 th anniversary,
Los Angeles and I are
more in love than ever.
Since fate brought us to-
gether in 20 12, I’ve been enam-
ored, entranced, obsessed with
grokking the city’s essence — not
only its vibrant now but its sto-
ried Technicolor past. Cruising
Sunset at sunset, that blazing
orange orb setting the city’s
spires afire, feels like moving
through time, peeling back the
palimpsest of the movies, music
and movements that have shaped
what we’ve watched, what we’ve
thought, who we’ve been.
I was in love with where I lived
only once before: magical Taos,
N.M., in the 1960 s, when I, and
people like me, stumbled around
the communes that dotted the
mesa-tops, dizzied by home-
grown pot, the thin, high-altitude
air, the pure, painterly light.
That’s where I was in ’68 when
Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda
roared into town on their chop-
pers, Fonda’s the iconic, flag-
draped Captain America Harley,
both dudes stoned on grass and
acid, filming Hopper’s directorial
debut. Made for a measly
$400,000, its dialogue mostly ad-
libbed, with real drugs imbibed
wherever the script said inhale,
“Easy Rider” stunned the world,
scoring two Oscar nominations
and becoming the fourth-high-
est-grossing movie of 1969.
“Easy Rider,” writes Vanity Fair
contributing editor Mark Rozzo
in his wonderful first book, “Ev-
erybody Thought We Were Crazy:
Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward,
and 1960 s Los Angeles,” was “the
first movie that looked the coun-
terculture in the eye, spoke its
dialect, articulated its hopes and
fears, and even critiqued it from
the inside. ... Dennis had prom-
ised to ‘bury’ Old Hollywood, and
it looked as though he might well
have succeeded.”
Rozzo’s book is ostensibly the
story of the eight-year, roiling
romance between “the coolest
kids in Hollywood”: outlaw artist
Dennis Hopper, who’d acted in
“Rebel Without a Cause,” and
debutante Brooke Hayward,
daughter of producer Leland
Hayward and actress Margaret
Sullavan. Hopper and Hayward
“were the prime catalysts and
connectors during a brief, kalei-
doscopic cultural moment when
Hollywood upstarts, art-world
superstars, and the emerging
shaggy aristocracy of rock
rubbed up against one another
and threw off sparks,” Rozzo
writes. “They embodied the colli-
sion of Old Hollywood and New,
of chic bohemia and the burgeon-A n unlikely couple, a surprising artistic forceMark Rozzo's ‘Everybody Thought We Were Crazy’ examines Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward’s impact on a moment in American cultural historying counterculture. They were as
implausible a couple as ever ex-
isted.”
Hopper and Hayward, co-stars
of the controversial anti-slavery
film “Mandingo,” fell in love on
set in 1961 and married shortly
thereafter. They f illed their Holly-
wood Hills home with fresh
works b y their friends and dinner
guests, Andy Warhol, Roy Lich-
tenstein, Ed Ruscha. Other regu-
lars included Hells Angels and
Black Panthers, rock stars and
mod fashionistas. Brooke’s bestie,
Jane Fonda, called 1712 North
Crescent Heights “magical.” Fre-
quent visitor Joan Didion called
it a place of “gaiety and wit.”
There, Hayward raised three kids
— two from her first marriage,
her third with Hopper — while
watching her husband devolve
into an alcoholic maniac with a
single burning desire: to make a
movie called “Easy Rider.”
“In 1968 [Brooke] found her-self subjected to the mounting
stresses of her husband’s — and
the decade’s — accelerating
weirdness,” Rozzo writes. “Some-
thing was going very awry with
the man she had fallen in love
with in 1961.” As a result, “Brooke
and Dennis’s idyllic Pop Art
house — s o full of color, hope, and
love — was turning into a lurid
marital drama stage set: Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with an
acid rock soundtrack.”
The marriage ended in 1969,
but Rozzo follows their contin-
ued hold on the public imagina-
tion. After the breakup, Hayward
retreated to the bedroom she’d
shared with Hopper to write the
exposé “Haywire,” a runaway
bestseller. Hopper returned to
Taos and bought the legendary
Mabel Dodge Luhan House, for-
mer gathering place of Georgia
O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel
Adams and Martha Graham. “He
envisioned reconstituting the bo-hemian glory of an earlier era in a
rugged outback town that, with
its sacred mountain and Native
American pueblo, was imbued
with cosmic feeling,” Rozzo
writes. His house became “a way
station for artists, musicians,
writers, filmmakers, and the era’s
robust supply of freaks.”
Hopper married four more
women, including Michelle Phil-
lips of the Mamas and Papas.
“The marriage lasted all of eight
days,” Rozzo writes. “ ‘The first
seven days were pretty good,’
Dennis reportedly said.”
Rozzo ends his rollicking tale
with a final reunion, back in L.A.,
in 2009, at Hopper’s deathbed.
“Brooke found her former hus-
band, now seventy-three and
with only a few months left to
live, in bed. He s at u p the moment
Brooke entered and began apolo-
gizing for everything he had put
her through.
“HE: Brooke, do you still loveme?
SHE: Yes, Dennis, of course.
HE: You’re the only woman I
ever loved.”
That was insanity, the reader
thinks, not love.
Which brings us to Rozzo’s
greatest authorial gift. By center-
ing his book on the juxtaposition
of opposing worlds — of Dennis
Hopper and Brooke Hayward; of
1960 s Los Angeles and 1960 s
Taos; of an America seemingly
poised to run on flower power
and an America that can’t quite
manage a civil Thanksgiving
meal — Rozzo makes each world,
each character and each reality
both shocking and believable,
both ridiculous and sublime.
As, I can attest, they were, in
1960 s mythology and in real life.Meredith Maran is a journalist, a
critic and the author of “The New Old
Me: My Late-Life Reinvention,”
among other books.DENNIS HOPPER/HOPPER ART TRUST
A t Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue and North Doheny Drive in Los Angeles, Dennis Hopper s hot “Double Standard” from the driver’s seat of his 1964 Corvair.EVERYBODY
THOUGHT WE
WERE CRAZY
Dennis Hopper,
Brooke
Hayward, and
1960s Los
Angeles
By Mark Rozzo
Ecco. 464 pp.
$29.99THE PUZZLER
One Man’s
Quest to Solve
the Most
Baffling Puzzles
Ever, From
Crosswords to
Jigsaws to the
Meaning of Life
By A.J. Jacobs
Random House.
368 pages. $28.BY MARK ATHITAKISPerhaps it’s fitting that the
new book b y A.J. Jacobs is
missing a piece. For “The
Puzzler,” he’s diligently
explored the world of Rubik’s
Cube, crosswords and Sudoku.
He’s logged hours in the air,
recruiting h is f amily to r epresent
the United States in Spain at the
world jigsaw championship.
(Team Jacobs came in second to
last.) He’s constructed and com-
peted in scavenger hunts and
talked chess with Garry Kasp-
arov. Yet his sprightly, far-reach-
ing book was completed too late
to make much room for Wordle,
the puzzle phenomenon that
went viral in late 2021. Nothing
has helped us find our covid-era
Zen, it s eems, q uite like spending
a few minutes every day looking
for a secret five-letter word.
Even without Wordle, there’s
room for a book like this from
Jacobs, who specializes in such
stunt titles as 200 4’s “The Know-
It-All” (for which he read an
encyclopedia) or 20 12’s “Drop
Dead Healthy” ( about his pursuit
of optimal fitness). The fans of
games like Wordle — for which
the New York Times is reported
to have paid seven figures in
January — are clearly seeking
something. But what? I’m not
sure myself, and I’ve long been
among the seekers. I complete at
least four crosswords daily, plus
Spelling Bee and Wordle (and
occasionally its mean cousins
Quordle and Octordle). Finish-
ing a Saturday crossword in
under 10 minutes gives me a
ridiculously deep sense of plea-
sure; my ongoing haplessness at
cryptic puzzles wounds my ego.
“The Puzzler” recognizes and
celebrates the frustration and
obsession.But explaining that obsession
is a little tougher, and though
Jacobs doesn’t avoid trying, he’s
mostly here to have fun. He’s
mastered an avuncular, jokey, at
times corny tone: Heading to
Spain for the jigsaw contest, he
quips that “ speed-solving jigsaws
sounded weird and paradoxical,
like a yoga tournament or a
napping derby.” And his topic
choices often spotlight the more
peculiar examples in the puzzle
world: the person who can finish
a Rubik’s Cube in a second using
his feet, the owner of a heart-
crushingly difficult Vermont
corn maze, and puzzlers like Jim
Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos,
a 19 90 sculpture in a c ourtyard at
CIA headquarters. It contains a
code that’s yet to be completely
cracked. When Jacobs tells a
Kryptos message board that he’s
visiting t he sculpture, the s olvers
have absurdly picayune requests.
“Look for odd-colored patches of
grass,” one suggests.
The puzzle-world pros Jacobs
interviews have a few ideas
about their fixations. Sometimes
it’s a craving for simplicity: “Life
is a puzzle,” crossword construc-
tor Peter Gordon tells him. “ With
crosswords, there is one correct
answer.” Sometimes it’s escape:
One competitive jigsawer says, “I
prefer solving jigsaw puzzles to
solving people puzzles. The piec-
es don’t talk back.” Sometimes
it’s self-improvement: “There is
so much faulty thinking, and
puzzles can help us think better,”
says math and logic-puzzle pro
Tanya Khovanova.
Jacobs is p articularly enchant-
ed with that puzzling-as-self-im-
provement theme. “Puzzles can
make us better people,” he as-
serts early on. Later, he argues
that thinking about things in
puzzlelike ways can encourage aproblem-solving mind-set. “If I
hear about the climate crisis, I
want to c url up in a fetal position
in the corner,” he writes. “But if
I’m asked about the climate puz-
zle, I want to try to solve it. That,
to me, is the only way out of our
current mess.”
But that’s just semantics. If it
were that simple, the ice caps
wouldn’t b e melting. Solutions tovarious global conflicts are no
closer for my reaching Genius at
Spelling Bee. Our biggest chal-
lenges demand consensus-build-
ing; puzzling, generally done
alone, seems like the opposite of
what’s required. The most per-
suasive explanation of puzzles’
appeal comes from Sudoku in-
ventor Maki Kaji, who’s devised
an elegant visualization to ex-plain the number game’s experi-
ence: “? ---> !” As with Sudokus,
so with life: a challenge, plus
mental effort applied to it, that
results in some feeling of sur-
prise or satisfaction. In all
things, we’re forever hunting
that exclamation point.
The book itself offers plenty of
opportunities to engage in the
chase. It’s lavishly illustrated
with vintage puzzles: the very
first Sudoku (published in 1979
under the homely name “Number
Place”), a Soviet-era visual puzzle,
a maze created by “Alice in Won-
derland” author Lewis Carroll, a
1969 chess puzzle by Vladimir
Nabokov. It’s also larded with a
new batch of puzzles, created by
Greg Pliska, that generally reside
in the sweet spot of entertaining
and frustrating that all good
puzzles require. (As Jacobs notes
when writing about scavenger
hunts, “The real goal is NOT to
stump the solvers.”) And the book
contains a secret puzzle whose
first solver will win $10,000.
That purse will no doubt im-
prove the life of whoever wins it.
But “The Puzzler” mainly shows
that we make too much of puz-
zles as vehicles for our better-
ment. At heart, they just expose
our funny, brilliant, quirky hu-
manness. We love riddles, Jacobs
writes, because they show how
we’re “rationalization machines.
We are great at finding patterns
where none exist.” And if we
don’t find the pattern? That’s
part of our humanness, too.
“There’s n o such t hing as failure,”
a chess-book author tells Jacobs.
“Just try to fail and fail and fail.”
Mission accomplished, every
day, millions of times over.Mark Athitakis is a critic in
Phoenix and author of “The New
Midwest.”A.J. Jacobs o n the power of puzzles to stimulate, confound and empower usCROWN; LEM LATTIMER
Author A.J. Jacobs suggests t hat doing puzzles encourages
a problem-solving mind-set.